Fatal Assistance

Award-winning Haitian born filmmaker Raoul Peck takes us on a two-year journey inside the challenging, contradictory, and colossal rebuilding efforts in post-earthquake Haiti. Through its provocative and radical point of view, FatalAssistance offers a devastating indictment of the international community's post-disaster idealism. The film dives headlong into the complexity of the reconstruction process and the practice and impact of worldwide humanitarian and development aid, revealing the disturbing extent of a general failure. We learn that a major portion of the money pledged to Haiti was never disbursed, nor made it into the actual reconstruction. Fatal Assistance leads us to one clear conclusion: current aid policies and practices in Haiti need to stop immediately. Official Selection Berlin Film Festival 2013

In August 2011 Human Rights Watch issued a report on the serious gaps in access to health care services harming women and girls displaced after the January 12, 2010 earthquake in Haiti. The report documents the lack of access to reproductive and maternal care in post-earthquake Haiti, even with the unprecedented availability of free health care services. Aid agencies worked to provide care that many women and girls did not benefit from due to lack of information and poor transportation. Moreover, the lack of coordination and data sharing on the part of donors and nongovernmental organisations made it difficult for human rights monitors, and the government itself, to assess the impact of these services.